In 1776, as the men of the Continental Congress debated independence and imagined a new nation, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, and asked him to do something radical:“remember the ladies.” In that same letter, she warned against giving husbands “such unlimited power” and wrote, “all men would be tyrants if they could.”

Abigail Adams did not have a podium. She had a voice.

She was not signing a founding document. She was writing from home, from the margins of official power — and yet she saw with startling clarity what the architects of the nation were building, and who they were leaving out. She understood that if a country was going to be born in the language of liberty while ignoring women, that contradiction would not disappear. It would harden into law, custom, marriage, property, politics, and  ...